


i've come around to my beginning

by frozen_sky



Series: at last [1]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Female Dante (Devil May Cry), Fluff, No Smut, Sibling Incest, but only for Dante
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 01:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19713277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_sky/pseuds/frozen_sky
Summary: Dante is seven, and just as strong as her brother.OR;Fem!Dante/Vergil, across four decades.Chinese translation:PART 1PART 2





	1. i've come around to my beginning

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to aloe (@haloefn), who practically wrote half the fic for me, and nagne ([@mlxgdog](https://twitter.com/mlxgdog)), who was the direct inspiration for this AU. check out their fanart in the next chapter! everything is so beautiful. Q_Q

Dante is seven, and just as strong as her brother. She scoops up their wooden swords and scrambles through the house in search of him, three spots flashing through her mind one after another if she doesn’t find him immediately: the house’s spotless, cozy little library; their mother’s garden, under the big maple; his room, obsessively tidy compared to Dante’s hurricane-blown mess.

She finds him in the library, because of course she does. Vergil sits cross-legged in his favorite alcove under the window, sun spots in his silvery hair and dust motes drifting lazily about. He’s reading a book, because again: of course he is.

Vergil doesn’t look up even when she pounces onto the seat beside him, their swords clattering in her arms. She pouts; he turns a page. A glance over his shoulder is all she needs to discern that it’s a book of poetry. Ugh. So boring.

“Vergillll. Let’s fight.”

“I’m reading.”

“C’mon,” she wheedles. “We’ve been inside all day! I’m bored.”

“You’ll find something to do.”

“I haaave. You’re just not cooperatinggggg.”

“Leave me alone, Dante.”

“Nuh uh,” she says with a grin. “C’mon Verg! That book isn’t going anywhere.”

But sometimes she wishes it. Ever since Vergil came back with it, he’s been ignoring her. What was so good about the stupid book, anyway? Just random words, strung together, making no sense at all.

Vergil sighs. “Neither are you, it seems.” He closes the book with a thud and gently sets it aside. Dante glares at it, but then her grin returns, wider than ever; she can’t help it, that swell of triumph when Vergil looks at her and reaches out a hand for one of the swords. _Take that, stupid book_! she thinks, as she lunges forward, grasps him by the arm, and drags him outside.

Dante is seven, and thinks she’s as strong as her brother. But Vergil knocks her on her butt again and again, and then he says _just give up, Dante_ , _you’re too weak_ and Dante throws down the wooden sword so she can tackle him and punch him directly.

Eva says it’s only natural, even though they’re twins: Dante’s body is made differently, after all. It’s just fact, biologically, or whatever—that girls naturally aren’t as strong as boys. Dante doesn’t go out much—in fact none of them go out much at all, because the town always whispers about them, and she and Vergil look different from all the other children, all the other _people_ , with their white hair and pale eyes—but she’s watched other girls play. And they don’t play the way Dante likes to, with swords and fists and even teeth, in the grass and mud and spitting out ladybugs that get into her mouth. Boys do. But boys—boys think she’s fragile.

“Take that back,” she snarls, and Vergil’s shock disappears under a smooth slide of blankness; he kicks back at her to toss her off him but she holds fast and then they’re wrestling, struggling like worms in the dirt.

“ _Take it back_!”

“It’s true!”

“It’s _not_!” she yells. Vergil freezes under her, and to her horror she realizes her cheeks are wet. There’s a teardrop on Vergil’s chin. Her brother looks up at her with eyes the size of dinner plates and she shoves away from him, scrubs her face violently, stumbles to her feet, and runs off.

“Dante!” she hears, but she’s already down the hill. Her boot snags a root; she takes a tumble, stomach swooshing up to her throat, and hears Vergil make another sound, but she’s back on her feet immediately and racing for the house. Her knee throbs.

She wants to run straight into her mother’s arms, but strong people don’t cry. She hides behind the house instead, plops under the neatly trimmed rose bushes in Eva’s garden, and wipes her tears with her forearms. Her sleeves aren’t long enough. It doesn’t work very well, only smears the wetness everywhere, so she rips the hem of her shirt out of her shorts and uses that.

There’s blood on her knee, a shiny wound speckled with gravel. Her thigh still hurts from where Vergil kicked her. They’ll heal soon, from her experience. But her brother is mean. Just because he beat her again—! She’s not weak. She’ll show him.

A rustle of grass reaches her ears. Vergil emerges from around the corner, looking harried, his stupid pushed-back hair falling all over his forehead. There’s a fading bruise on his cheek and Dante feels viciously proud.

He pauses when he sees her. His shoulders fall, tensed as they were to his ears, and he shuffles forward and stops a few handspans away, like he’s not sure if he should come closer.

“Don’t cry.”

“‘M not crying,” Dante mutters, tries to sniffle discreetly, but isn’t very successful given the look on Vergil’s face.

He finally decides to approach. Dante considers punching him again, but her vision’s a little blurry still, so she might miss. Then Vergil’ll make fun of her forever.

He crouches in front of her. “I saw you fall,” he says. Dante sticks her tongue out at him. He ignores her. “Let me see.”

Dante reluctantly unravels herself and lets Vergil inspect her knee. The skin is already knitting itself back together, though it struggles around the gravel. He brushes it aside gently and the skin coalesces into a fresh scab. It’ll heal completely soon. Vergil puts a kiss on it anyway, the way their mother did when they were four and getting themselves hurt for the first time.

Dante thinks about kneeing him in the mouth. She doesn’t, though, because she likes it when Vergil pays attention to her.

“I didn’t mean it the way you thought,” he says. His ears are a little pink; it stands out against his white hair.

“Yes you did,” says Dante petulantly.

“I’m trying to say sorry.”

“Well, you suck at it.”

“ _Dante_.” Vergil sits down too and folds his legs. “You’ll get stronger.”

“You bet,” says Dante. “The strongest. Stronger than you, for sure.”

Vergil rolls his eyes, but doesn’t say anything.

It’s a concession, if nothing else.

A year later, her world burns.

She finds their mother in a pool of her own blood. Her room is ashes; so is Vergil’s. The maple in the garden still stands, its trunk blackened and burnt, but the rose bushes are dusty skeletons and soot in the soil. The library is a smoldering husk under the collapsed rafters, but the sunlight continues to shine through the blown-out window in Vergil’s smoke-stained alcove.

For the first time in her life, Dante cannot find Vergil.

She leaves, eventually. Drags out the Rebellion and a photo of their mother from under the rubble, clutches her amulet to her chest, follows their mother’s last directives. Catches the faintest scent of Vergil in the playground down the hill, upwind of the smothering smoke still hissing from the ruins.

There’s nothing left of him but dried blood tacked to the grass.

This time, she cries without shame.

There’s no one left to judge.

Time passes. Dante becomes Tony and meets new people; Tony grows up. Tony becomes a mercenary and Tony keeps her hair short, after that one time a demon nearly rips her head off from snagging its claws into her uncombed tangles.

Tony dresses for mobility and convenience and doesn’t care if people ogle her; rather likes it, in fact. She’s strong enough to kick the ass of anyone who thinks they can slip in a fondle with their cash, anyway—and they try, sometimes. The third time a man kisses the sole of her boot, word gets around.

Shit happens. Tony becomes Dante, and Dante mourns. She wonders if she’s doomed to mourn for the rest of her life.

Then she meets Vergil again. Her heart thunders at the sight of him, pale hair and same face, arctic eyes and an unsmiling mouth. He’s gotten tall, so much taller than her, and that’s—that’s just unfair. He’s alive, though. Ain’t that the damndest thing.

He’s different.

There’s blood and ash and sulfur on her tongue. This is not the brother who clumsily tried to console her and kiss away her bruises. _Have you lost it_? she says, Ebony a cold comfort in her hand. _Mom was killed by demons_.

 _I know_. So, so cold.

They fight. Dante and Vergil have always fought, practice sword against practice sword, fist against fist, ever since Sparda started their lessons and especially once Sparda disappears, after their mother takes them both into her lap and delicately wraps her lips around the syllables: _he’s not coming back_. But they have never fought like this. Vergil draws first blood and the shock of Yamato’s thin blade slicing through her bared stomach stops her short. Another slice, a flash sharp and bright—and Dante hears the clink of a chain breaking, sees her amulet fly into the air.

 _Oh_ , she thinks, in a distant fog. Watches the scarlet gem glimmer once, twice in the meager light before its cloaked by Vergil’s glove. _That’s what he wants_.

But Vergil tosses it back. “I can take it anytime.”

That burns. That burns _hard_. Her breath catches in her throat. Her fingers dig into her wound, aggravate her healing, but she barely notices the flare of pain. Rage makes her vision swim, clenches tight around her chest.

For a split second, she thinks she sees his brow furrow, but then it’s gone again. The smallest ripple in the stillest lake.

“Dante,” he starts. Dante rips the amulet off Rebellion‘s edge, where it had caught. She fumbles with the broken chain before giving up and stuffing it back in her pocket. She can’t look at him.

Just as well, because that means she doesn’t have to see him leave.

He comes back, though. Months later, as she’s mulling over the stack of catalogs she swiped from the convenience store down the block. She’s still looking for furniture, though given the prices it looks like her office might be bare bar desk, jukebox, and couch for just a little bit longer.

Vergil’s power thrums through her before she even sights him at her door. Her eyes flick to the Rebellion, propped up against the side of the desk.

“Oh,” she drawls, reclining back in her chair, even though her heart thumps rabbit-quick against her ribcage. “Look who it is. Finally remembered your sister, did you?”

“Do you always leave your door unlocked?” says Vergil, a frown already twisting the corner of his mouth.

Dante shrugs. “I’ve nothing to steal.” Except one thing, and evidently Vergil is here for it.

“That’s not the point.” Vergil stops in the center of the essentially empty room. He didn’t come unarmed: his hand is curled around Yamato, sheathed and deceptively docile.

“What’s it to you, anyway?” Dante watches him through lowered lashes. “You’re here for my amulet.”

Like a magnet, Vergil’s eyes zero in on her chest, where the memento rests cold and heavy beneath her collarbone.

There’s a pause.

“Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”

“Oh, _now_ you notice.” Dante crosses her arms under her breasts, which are confined perfectly modestly by her belt strap, thanks. “What, was your head too far up your own ass the other day?”

Vergil’s eyes narrow. A thrill tingles down Dante’s spine, chilled and sharp.

“I was focused on other matters.”

“Mmhm. I’m sure they were very important.” Dante rocks forward, elbows on the desk. The amulet clinks against the wooden edge. Vergil doesn’t move though, doesn’t even glance back at it, so Dante can give him credit for that, she supposes. She tries to swallow down the heavy stone in her heart. Puts on a grin instead, toothy and irreverent.

“Well, then? Whatchu waiting for? I’m here, you found me. Let’s get this party started.”

The next step Vergil takes toward her, she’ll draw the Rebellion, she tells herself. She won’t condone this bullheaded determination to undo their father’s work and spit on their mother’s memory; this stupid, meaningless lust for power. Wasn’t she the one who wanted to be stronger when they were little?

Vergil doesn’t take that step, though. He looks around instead, at Dante’s empty office, with its solid wood desk and tacky secondhand jukebox (it’s not tacky. Dante loves it), and _oooooh_ , Dante knows he’s judging her. As if he has any right to criticize her taste! He wears a _cravat_ , for the sake of all things unholy.

“How meager,” Vergil murmurs.

Dante rises to the bait. “No one asked you.”

 _Your job will soon be over_ , he’d told her. It hangs in the air between them, Vergil’s grandiose, incomprehensible plan. Dante doesn’t understand, _can’t_ understand, has laid wide awake on her tiny, dingy mattress at night staring up the cracked plaster, struggling to fathom, struggling to reconcile the Vergil of her memories with the cool effigy of him that stands before her now.

She doesn’t _want_ to understand. Demons killed their mother. That was all she needed.

Vergil merely raises an elegantly arched eyebrow. “You’ll need more than just a desk and a couch, sister,” he says, as if he hadn’t cut her open like so much deli meat last they met.

Dante falls back into her seat, boots on the desk. “I’m working on it,” she grumbles.

“And a shirt.”

“ _That_ is an unnecessary expense.”

“ _Dante_.”

The exasperation in his voice flings her back a decade. “Vergil,” she says back, because she can, because she has a brother to say it back to, after ten years believing him dead. She hopes it doesn’t sound as choked as she suddenly feels.

Of course it does. Dante has never been able to control herself the way Vergil could—can. She feels his eyes on her even as she reaches for the catalog again, a good distraction, though every other sense remains honed on his continued presence. He’ll reach for the amulet again. She knows this like she knows her mother is dead, and lets the resentment pool in her gut.

When Vergil decides to move, it’s to set Yamato against the arm of the couch. Dante peeks over the top of the catalog, mouth parted.

“I noticed there wasn’t a sign.”

“Right,” says Dante, quickly composing herself. “That’s _right_. How the hell did you find me?”

“I wonder.”

She huffs. “That isn’t creepy at all.”

“There are worse things,” says Vergil. “Have you given no thought to naming your establishment?”

She throws up her hands—and the catalog, which lands in a heap behind her on the floor—and collapses onto her desk with a moan. “I know, I know, I’ll figure it out, stop interrogating me.”

“Who will, if not me?”

“I don’t need a nagger,” she mutters, even as her gaze falls on Eva’s portrait.

“Dante, you don’t wear a _shirt._ Clearly your judgment is questionable.”

“If it bothers you so much, stop looking at me,” she says snottily, squinting at Vergil through her sloppy bangs.

It’s because she’s watching him that she sees him tense, so minutely she might have imagined it. He sits down on her couch. The sight is jarring. Probably because she never thought she’d see it.

What was her brother playing at?

Whatever. She can take him.

The doorbell rings. Vergil’s eyes snap up, his hand already reaching for the Yamato, but Dante merely flings herself over the top of her desk and flounces over to the door. “Pizza delivery,” she singsongs, and yanks it open to a blast of fresh air and a cool breeze. Her coat billows back, and, yup, okay, the pizza man is definitely staring.

“Bless you,” she says, reaching over to take the warm, fragrant box directly, because he seems to have momentarily forgotten his job. Dante wants her damn pizza.

Suddenly the man jerks to attention and frantically begins digging into his pockets for the receipt. Dante feels more than sees Vergil approach from behind her, his footsteps on the worn wood floor slow and measured. Almost predatory.

“What, you gonna pay for me?” she says, throwing him a look over her shoulder. She angles the box away from him and sticks out her tongue. “Mine.”

Vergil’s expression is impossibly cold, but he’s not looking at Dante. Oh, no; the poor delivery man looks like he might combust. Dante quickly accepts the receipt and shoos him off. Vergil is already sweeping away when she closes the door and rounds on him.

“What the hell?”

“I hope you don’t eat this often,” says Vergil, like he hasn’t just made an innocent man piss his pants for no discernible reason whatsoever.

“Every day,” says Dante, to be contrary, but also because it’s true. “Vergil, really? That guy wouldn’t have done anything if I’d ripped open my holster and flashed him.”

Vergil’s lip curls. “How uncouth.”

He’s still bristling like an offended cat and Dante doesn’t get it—doesn’t get the slight curl of warmth in the deepest recesses of her ribcage, either. She rubs absently at her sternum and sets the pizza down on her desk, opening the lid with a reverence she rarely bestows. Here is the miracle of pizza: when she takes the first bite, she almost forgets that Vergil is there.

He doesn’t try to steal her pizza, and he doesn’t stay for much longer. In the end she displays her amulet, hands framed around it in a taunting temptation, and Vergil gazes at it for two seconds too long—then shakes his head, and turns away.

Dante watches his coattails disappear out the door, biting back _will you come again_? all the while.

He does. Again and again, in fact, though weeks pass in between, and Dante fills in the time with jobs and pizza and gatecrashing demon parties. She doesn’t want to know what Vergil is doing when he’s not with her. She can guess. And she knows she should stop him.

But their time together has become stupidly homey, in a way. Too familiar, Dante thinks. They pass the hours arguing and bantering over insignificant things and that’s always been their norm, but Vergil has yet to draw Yamato against her again and Dante wonders if it’s because the next time he does, it will be to kill her.

They’ve reached a standstill, a limbo, a demilitarized zone stretched between them, where nothing is happening and nothing is wrong. In Dante’s most quiet moments, tangled in the sheets during the witching hour, she realizes she doesn’t want it to end. So she doesn’t aggravate it. Doesn’t talk about it. And Vergil does the same.

He stays, sometimes. Those are the worst nights for her racing thoughts, knowing he’s downstairs, not knowing whether tonight will be the night he comes up and takes one of the last things that ever matters to her. Those nights, her fingers loop around the chain of her amulet—replaced, after Vergil sliced through it—and she sleeps with hand and jewel both under her pillow. If she sleeps at all.

What’s messed up is she _wants_ Vergil to stay. She has a family again, even if sometimes being in the same room with him feels like she’s walking on eggshells.

Hah. Family.

The first time she jerks awake from phantom caresses and a soft mouth against her neck, a whisper of _Dante_ fading into the rustle of sheets—she panics. Scrambles to her knees on the bed and clutches her duvet to her chest, breathing hard.

Just a fluke.

The second time, though—the second time, she sees his face, silver hair a messy curtain over pale blue irises, so similar to her own. Gelid but not cruel. His hands cradle her thighs and his lips are in her hair, and she knows intrinsically that it’s a dream because Vergil would never be so gentle.

She blinks awake, then screams into a pillow. So, absolutely, monumentally, _not cool_.

Thankfully, Vergil is not downstairs. He left two days ago, not that she’s keeping track or anything. She collapses into her chair behind the desk and grabs for a magazine, studiously avoiding the gaze of Eva’s portrait, but the glossy photos of gorgeous men and women alike do nothing to detract her mind from hurtling tumultuously toward her doom.

Her heart aches. Her blunted nails crinkle against the pages. She misses her brother, and she’s mad pissed about it. With a huff of frustration, she tosses the mag at the far wall. Gravity and air resistance deem it unworthy of making it; it lands with a sad thump on her couch.

There’s a shirt sitting next to it, neatly folded, which Dante has been ignoring for the past three days. The gall of him, to have brought her a shirt after their umpteenth argument over Dante’s choice of wardrobe.

She stomps over to it and snatches it up, fisting both of her hands into the hem with every intention of ripping it apart. Pauses, when the shirt unfolds to its full size. It’s bigger than she thought. Another pause, this time of hesitation; then she brings it up to her nose, and inhales.

A shudder dances down her spine. It smells like Vergil. She pulls away so she can take a good look at it and runs her hand across the soft, dark material. Is this his? She’s certainly never seen him wear it, or anything besides his vest and ridiculous cravat, but it occurs to her that Vergil must sleep _somewhere_ when he’s not hanging about her office like he owns the place. Somewhere that harbors whatever worldly possessions he owns besides Yamato, his amulet, and the clothes on his back.

Her chest gives a pang. They’re twins, yet she knows so little about him.

Well, screw him, she thinks, tugging off her strap. Screw him, she hisses, letting her coat drop in a heap on the floor. She stuffs the shirt over her head and flops onto the couch, arms tightly crossed, feet on the cushions. So insistent she cover up her boobs, but too cheap to buy her something new. What kind of brother is he?

She feels stupid for putting it on. But then she buries her face in her arms, and Vergil’s scent surrounds her, and it feels a little like home.

She’ll never admit it to him, but she wears it after that, even though his scent fades within a couple days, replaced by Dante’s, then by blood and demon viscera, then soap. Even though Vergil doesn’t come back for weeks, and then months. Up until demons crash through her windows and shred it to bits, and an ugly tower rises from the earth directly at her doorstep.

She discards it, and heads out.

Dante gasps wetly, struggles not to choke on her own blood. The pain is excruciating, red-hot and sharp like lightning; doubly so in her chest, the left side of her ribcage, where her heart lies black and devoid of hope. She’s bitter, alright. Fuck.

_Might controls everything._

Vergil tears the Yamato out of her ribs. Flicks the blood off the glimmering blade and sheaths her in a single fluid motion. Dante falls, and Vergil finally takes her amulet.

 _Asshole_ , she thinks, as she goes down. She lands with a crack onto the wet stone, and the ensuing bolt of agony knocks every last breath and coherent thought straight out of her.

When she wakes, she’s standing, and there’s a newborn fire in her veins. She’s alone atop the tower, and her coat is folded neatly on the floor, chest strap sliced clean open.

She’s also wearing Vergil’s vest.

“Oh, fuck you too,” she says aloud, and punches the nearest spire. “Pervert.”

In the end, Arkham is dealt with. In the end, they fight side-by-side, completely in sync, even though all their lives they’ve only faced each other down the end of their swords. For a single, deified moment, Vergil meets her eyes from across the way, and she feels it, their shared adrenaline, shared exaltation, their twin connection she didn’t think she would feel again.

Then it’s over and Vergil is diving for the Force Edge. Dante sees red.

What follows: she says, _even if I have to kill you_. And Vergil’s smooth face does something strange, something complicated, but she’s too angry to care, too betrayed to stop, and they charge at each other and she feels the soft give of Vergil’s flesh beneath Rebellion’s blade, like a hot knife through butter. So easy.

She turns back and he’s holding the wound that bisects him from rib to hip, his prussian blue coat (buttoned up for the lack of vest, so prudish, even now) bleeding a rich, dark scarlet. He staggers, and in that split second remorse blasts through her with such force that her next breath chokes in her lungs.

Her mouth opens. _Brother_ —, she wants to say, but horror stops her short when he doesn’t stop staggering. Toward the drop and the distant roar of water, Force Edge abandoned, his own amulet clutched tight to his chest.

“Leave me and go,” he rasps, and it’s the last thing he says to her before he tilts back.

She lunges for him a second too late. A flash of Yamato, a sting across her palm. Her knees go weak as she stares down, down into the blackest abyss, her hand still outstretched.

Only darkness greets her regret.

Life goes on. Dante returns the Kalina Ann to Lady, and it’s the pity in Lady’s gaze that nearly does her in. Dante’s eyes sting; it’s all she can do to laugh it off as they fight off ambush after ambush, demonic leftovers not worth their time.

Later, when she’s finally back home, she sheds her coat, with its broken chest strap. Sheds the vest, which hangs just as loosely on her frame as the shirt before it. Tugs off her gloves, dirt-crusted and bloody; one undamaged, the other harboring a tear so clean and precise it might’ve been inflicted by a surgeon’s scalpel.

Searches absently for another shirt to wear. Can’t find one, so she gives up and drops onto the couch instead. Clutches the vest to her with shaking hands, and buries her face into its folds.

She names her establishment.

Time passes—most of it, admittedly, in a haze. Her office fills out with furniture, a wet bar, collectibles, other knick knacks, and trash. Lots and lots of trash. There’s a tower of pizza boxes stacked on the corner of her desk that she’s determined to make reach the ceiling, and it’s rivaled only by the rows of empty whisky bottles lined sloppily behind her.

The jobs roll in, a steady stream of work, though Dante takes more than a couple of them unpaid. Lady drops in, too, and makes her own dent in Dante’s income, for whatever the hell Dante owes her. It tends to be a lot. Dante doesn’t really keep track.

She keeps the glove in her drawer, which she never opens unless she’s on her fifth finger of liquor. She keeps the vest in the back of her closet. The very, very back.

She covers up now, too, layers upon layers. Vergil would’ve been proud.

Her heart still shakes around his name. Whereas once she laid awake at night ruminating their coexistence, now she lays awake wondering if he’s still alive. She hopes desperately that he is. She hopes desperately that he isn’t. In a cruel twist of fate, she still dreams—ethereal, whimsical intimacy turned bleak and hollow before she jerks awake in a sheen of sweat and drenched sheets.

One year turns into two, two to four, four to five to six to seven. Her hair grows longer. She hacks it off with the Rebellion when it gets in her way and impatiently brushes her bangs aside.

He must be dead. He has to be dead. Or maybe he’s come back and just fucked off to wherever he wants to go without seeing her; she wouldn’t put it past him. Why would he want to see her, anyway? It’s not like she wants to see _his_ stupid face.

Hmph. She takes another pull of whisky.

She’d wanted so badly to be stronger than him, when she was little. Bitter fucking irony, that.

A carbon copy of her mother destroys the front door of her office and Dante finds herself on an island in the middle of nowhere. Vengeance licks fire from her very core, burning out the last vestiges of alcohol-induced sluggishness from her veins. She has no one to blame for her brother, but at least she can kick the ass of her mother’s murderer all the way to kingdom come.

But of course, because Dante’s life sucks _dick_ , she gets more than she bargains for.

Her Devil Arm skewers the Angelo’s armor, slides straight through its (his?) chest like a goddamn marshmallow. She takes a grim satisfaction in the finality of the act, wrenching out the blade with a grind of bone and squelch of demonic flesh and resheathing it against her back.

As the Angelo collapses, gurgling in its death throes, a sharp clatter reaches her ears. A glint reaches her eye.

Apocalyptic is the barren cold that sweeps through her when she bends down to pick up the amulet. Her head snaps back to her dying enemy, with its ( _his_ ) pallid skin and white hair, and no. _No_. Panic renders her lightheaded, nausea rips through her inhuman fortitude; she drops to her knees hard enough to bruise and takes him by the shoulders and turns him over.

How had she not recognized him? Her blood doesn’t resonate in his presence anymore and his skin is discolored and his sclera is black and his irises are red but the slope of his forehead, the cut of his cheekbones… they’re the same. _They’re the same_.

“Vergil,” she whispers. His eyes slide over to hers, slow and listless, blank and muddy. His body is already glowing, his inky armor already disintegrating.

One heartbeat, two. On the third, he opens his mouth. Nothing comes out, but she hears him in her memories.

 _Dante_.

He turns to dust in her arms. Her grief is insensate. She rips Mundus apart.

Trish and Lady get along spectacularly, and somehow in the past decade Dante’s entourage has gone from one asskicking demon huntress to two to three. They’re an asskicking trio, now. If Dante ever crawls out of her drunken stupor, she’ll make sure to take triumph from that. Take _that_ , everyone who thought her weak. Take _that_ , her dead brother, who she murdered accidentally.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He’s dead now, 100%. Gone. Zilch. Nada. She’d wanted closure, and the universe delivered; delivered it in the most fucked up dish imaginable.

She notes absently that the number of empty whisky bottles far outnumbers the boxes in her pizza tower, even though Trish and Lady are adding to the latter. If she were solely human, her liver would be shriveled dead, for sure. But she isn’t. Solely human, that is—and it’s never been more evident than when it takes her three whole bottles to get drunk.

Her two compatriots try to help her, to their credit, and sometimes Dante allows it; allows them to drag her into the shower and spray scalding hot water in her face, allows them to clean up the mess she makes of herself and the room around her. Sometimes Dante even manages on her own. Then she sees her couch and remembers something as stupidly mundane as Vergil sitting on it, and the grief returns in a chokehold so tight she struggles to breathe.

Her dreams aren’t kind anymore, either, and they plague her like a parasite. Night after night she sees Vergil falling backwards, out of her sight, out of her reach, no matter how fast she runs, no matter how close she is to the edge. Every time she stops short, knees locked, hands shaking, and blinks awake before she can jump in after him.

So she stops sleeping. Not until her body demands it. It’s fine. She’s fine. She’s half demon; she doesn’t need much sleep anyway.

Jobs come and go. She takes some, and leaves others to Trish or Lady. She meets Patty, and for a short time Devil May Cry is the cleanest it’s ever been. She ends up in the Underworld for a long stint, because in all honesty she doesn’t really give a fuck about the ongoings of the human world anymore. She searches for traces of Vergil while she’s there, even though she knows, viscerally, how pointless of an endeavor it is.

Dante finds her way back, and a week later Lady comes in with a job. She’s exhausted and world-weary and her shoulders feel weighed down by anvils—but she goes. Of course she does.

Fortuna is a strange place. She stands out everywhere like a sore thumb on a good day, but in Fortuna she feels like a supernova, and she briefly considers grabbing a cloak and hood for herself if only to stop people from staring. It’s been nine years since she took pleasure in being ogled.

What a drab wardrobe they all wear, too, same-y and uninspired. Even with a cloak her coat would be a fresh burst of blood against a gray sky.

She does some reconnaissance. Trish is already here, and Dante can feel the steady pulse of the Devil Sword Sparda nearby, even if she can’t quite pinpoint its location. She scales one of the buildings for a better view of the city and leans against the parapet, raises her chin and closes her eyes. There’s a breeze today. Gentle, just right.

Her blood throbs. She freezes; her eyes snap open. Waits, five seconds, ten, her heart in her throat.

Another throb.

Her fingers curl into fists against the dusty brick, then loosen through force of will. She takes a breath. She needs to stay calm.

She hasn’t felt a resonance like this since the tower. Since she last stood shoulder to shoulder with her brother.

It can’t be, she thinks.

There’s no power on earth that can stop her from investigating further. She switches roofs. Circles the entire circumference of the city, quick but thorough, before zeroing in on the forest that surrounds it.

She lands in the midst of a bloody fray, coattails aflare like a crimson cloud, Rebellion singing in her gloved grip. The demons turn toward her and she dispatches them one by one, pivoting and spinning and parrying in a dance her body has known for two decades. Only when she’s returned the Rebellion to her rightful place on her back does Dante look toward the children she has just saved.

There’s a boy and girl, both no more than nine or ten years old, both of their mouths agape. Her eyes zero in on the boy—on the boy’s white hair and pale blue eyes. He’s clutching his shoulder, and though it looks normal bar the bloody tear in his shirt and cotton debris tangled with wet broken skin, it radiates demonic energy like a leaking gas valve.

Her blood pounds; her heartbeat thunders in her ears. Disappointment is lead in her stomach, but she can admit to a glimmer of intrigue.

She cocks a hand on her hip and shoots them a grin she doesn’t feel. “Aren’t you kids a little bit too young to be wandering outside the city?”

The boy still seems too stunned to speak. It’s the little brunette behind him who quickly comes out to clasp her hands together and bow her head. “Thank you very much for saving us.”

“Just doin’ my part,” says Dante.

“You look like me,” blurts the boy.

She arches an eyebrow at him. “Sure, kid, if you were taller and female.”

The boy stammers. The girl tugs on his sleeve. “Nero, we should get back. You need a doctor.”

Nero nods and looks mulishly down at the grass for moment. When he raises his head again, there’s a gleam of determination in his eyes, so oddly familiar that a quiet, latent part of Dante startles. “You’re not from around here, right? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Mm, maybe.”

“Are you… Is there anyone…” He falters, and looks aside again.

Her gaze is drawn back to his arm when he digs his fingers into his shoulder, like it hurts. She knows what he’s trying to ask. His cheeks are red, small mouth pinched in a moue of frustration, his ghostly hair tousled and wispy against his forehead.

Dante’s never really much liked kids. Too loud, too fragile, too much responsibility. Maybe she’s just tired after so much grief, so much liquor, so much time spent fruitlessly searching the Underworld; maybe she’s just a little bit lonely. But her callused heart softens for him.

“People who look like us, right?” she says. “Maybe. But I’ve only seen you and me.”

His face falls. His friend looks sad, too. “Do you think—,” and then he pauses, and blushes even more furiously, and turns back to his friend and takes her hand. “Nevermind. Let’s go back.”

They scurry off. She can still sense the boy’s right arm pulsing erratically even after he disappears into the undergrowth. She’s experienced weirder things, honestly, but never a human with a single limb drenched in demonic energy, and never a single soul whose presence had called out to her in quite this way. Not since her brother.

Which begs the question: who is he? Had Sparda sowed his oats, so to speak, in other places around the human world, and Dante’s just never heard about it? She wouldn’t put it past him, in retrospect. What else does a demon got going for him for 2000 years, anyway? No way was he celibate before Eva.

Great, what a wonderful train of thought.

A more likely possibility flashes through her head, one that stops her cold. The boy isn’t hers, she knows this with absolute certainty. She’s never—

But would—? It’s been almost ten years since, and the boy looks right around that age, and—she can’t imagine that he would, with how cold and put-together and disdainful of humans he’d been—but—

She shakes her head. Overthinking this can wait until after the job is done, when she’s back in the office with her two best friends: pizza and whisky. Then she can wonder and mope and angst all she wants.

She heads back into the city.

Ultimately, Dante’s given the answer whether she wanted it or not. She comes across the Yamato deep within a hidden research facility and the sight of its snow-white tsuka and beautiful, broken blade nearly shreds her heart in two. She takes it, of course. Cuts down the curator’s little minions and decimates the facility’s load-bearing walls, and though the curator himself scurries off like the disgusting insect he is, Dante is fine with it. There’s a sinister plot going on that he’s a part of; she will come for him eventually.

She takes a moment to stroke Yamato’s broken edge, to gaze at her reflection in the gleaming steel. The mere fact that the katana has been snapped in half stings between her ribs. Her brother must have been thoroughly trounced; he would not have lost Yamato otherwise. Would have held on, till the last of his strength seeped through his fingers.

She closes her eyes and presses her forehead to Yamato’s hilt, like a beloved.

The blade is unwieldy to carry in two pieces, but she manages. It doesn’t end up mattering for long; the boy returns, dragged into trouble by the unsightly demon arm that has mutated up to his shoulder. Yamato sings, the same way Rebellion does when Dante’s gearing up for a fight, and her two broken ends snap together again.

Dante breathes out. _What’s your name_? she asks, as she deflects another blow away from him.

 _Nero_ , he says, bright eyes burning wild with fear and fire both.

After, when Sanctus is defeated, when the Savior has crumbled and Kyrie and Credo are both safe and Trish is waiting for her at the city gates, Nero reaches up to tug on her coat and finally ask, in a small, hesitant voice: _Are you my mother_?

And Dante looks down at him, at his skinny frame and big eyes and pouty mouth, and sees a part of Vergil looking back at her, the only part of him left. She thinks about her dead father and dead mother and dead brother. She thinks: _No._ She thinks _: But._

She takes Nero back to Devil May Cry with her against her better judgment. Trish teases her ruthlessly for the first hour, but when Nero asks Trish’s name and gazes up at her with those big, soulful eyes, Trish shuts up pretty quickly.

Dante doesn’t know what she was thinking (she does). She can barely take care of herself, much less another living being, much less a _child_ , and that is what Nero is—barely nine, in his words, raised in the Order alongside Kyrie and Credo his whole life.

Does she—does she have to babyproof the office or something? Or? What do kids even need? Leashes???

What did she need when she was nine? Well, let’s make a list, shall we, Dante: the Rebellion, food, shelter, her mom’s amulet, and hello, her family. Very helpful.

Trish, the absolute traitor, splits off to go visit Lady, leaving Dante to unlock the door to Devil May Cry and flick on the light. She cringes a little at the sight it reveals: the leaning tower of pizza, the hall of whisky bottles, loose leaf papers scattered this way and that. She doesn’t think she’s dusted the ceiling fan once in ten years, and the last time the floor was cleaned, well…

Nero shuffles in after her. He’s gotten progressively shyer the farther away they got from Fortuna, which she supposes is understandable, if Fortuna is all he’s ever known. With Nero facing away, Dante brings two fingers to her forehead and presses deep. Oh, boy. She hopes she doesn’t regret this.

Nero’s nose crinkles. “It’s so dirty.”

Scratch that. Nero’s probably already regretting it.

“Well, I’ve been gone for a bit,” she says, and begins, hastily, to pick up the worst of the mess. “Came to Fortuna after half a year in a cesspit, you know the drill.”

“The drill?”

“Never mind,” Dante mutters. She tosses the empty bottles into the bin, then turns to assess her epic pizza box tower. It would be such a pity…

Rustling makes her look aside to where Nero has started making his way through the debris, bending over periodically to pick up stray magazines from the floor. She balks for a moment when one of them gapes open to reveal a skimpily-clad woman on the beach.

“Let me take that,” she says in a rush, and quickly collects the bundle of mags from his arms. He only blinks at her, unassuming.

Together, they clear out the clutter. As Dante gently mounts Yamato on the wall behind her desk and Nero goes hunting for another trash bag, she can’t help but marvel at him. He hadn’t needed to help.

Step two is the food situation.

She’s eaten pizza every day since she opened for business, and Dante might not know much about children, but she’s pretty sure children need like, vitamins, or something. Her pizza usually comes with every topping but olives, so that does include veggies ( _“In no way does that count, Dante_ ,” she remembers Vergil saying, once), but Nero probably needs more than that…

She’s gonna have to buy groceries, what the fuck. And she’ll need to buy him a bed, eventually, though it’s not as urgent; Dante doesn’t mind sacrificing hers to him in the meantime, since she barely sleeps as it is and the couch is comfortable enough.

Nero drifts off eventually, likely exhausted from the past few days. He’s small enough to be curled up on a single cushion on the sofa, his arms wrapped around himself and his snores kitten-soft. Dante hesitates, then gingerly lowers herself down on the floor in front of him. She reaches out and lightly touches his demonic right arm. It pulses once in response.

She’ll have to help him hone this, too. Proof of his heritage.

She rises to her feet in search of a relatively clean blanket to drape over him. Another thing to tack onto her to-do list: washing her sheets so Nero can sleep in a proper bed.

Dante has no idea what she’s doing, and there’s a new budding terror in her that she’s gonna fuck up, but something within her still bids her to try. She has her brother’s son sleeping on her couch; she isn’t alone anymore, after almost a decade. She’ll do right by him. By him and her brother both.

It’s a learning process, though. She burns the first few meals she attempts and Nero eats without complaint, but she feels embarrassed enough that she falls back on frozen prepackaged dinners and pizza three days a week. Nero doesn’t complain then, either, but he does complain about the state of the office, and Dante should be ashamed that a child is doing more cleaning and sprucing up than she’s ever done since she started renting the place, but mostly she’s just endeared.

Trish and Lady finally visit again and Lady coos over Nero’s round cheeks and fluffy hair, much to Nero’s chagrin. The two ladies quickly become alternating babysitters when Dante’s pulled out on a job, and she returns some nights to Lady reviewing numbers with him and Trish patiently answering his questions about his arm. They bring him books (which Nero squints at, then asks politely for mechanical manuals), clothes (Nero’s yells echo downstairs as they stuff him into the umpteenth outfit of the day), little souvenirs (which Nero keeps on a shelf for display), and a little potted plant for him to take care of (because an actual pet would be too much trouble).

And Dante, too, finds him things: she gives him a practice sword, and watches his excited swings with a nostalgic pang in her heart.

Life settles and she realizes one day that the darkness as receded some, and that the bad days are coming further and further apart. Her stash of whisky, once obscenely sizeable, has been regulated to only a couple bottles in the cabinets. There’s noise and movement in the office now instead of just the rickety old ceiling fan; she likes that. And there’s someone waiting for her at the end of a job, someone who needs her, and she likes that more.

She still doesn’t sleep well, but you can’t have everything.

Nero is ten the first time he calls her _Mom_. The surrealness of the situation almost makes Dante drop her piping hot pizza slice; Nero immediately goes red and looks like he wants to melt into the floorboards. Which would be unacceptable, because the warmth that suffuses Dante is so sudden and so powerful that she carefully sets down her pizza and pulls Nero into a hug.

Nero grows up in a blink of an eye. Before Dante knows it he’s shooting past her in height, bumping into doorframes and tables and stumbling over his own feet as he tries to adjust. Dante doesn’t know how it happens, but he becomes remarkably self-sufficient, too, spontaneously picking up an interest in cooking and banning Dante from the kitchenette after she turns on the oven and promptly forgets about it for six hours. He takes over the bookkeeping after the third time the power shuts off and they have to eat cold pizza for dinner and guzzle all the milk before it goes bad.

Dante feels kinda ousted by her own adopted son sometimes. Jeez.

More years pass. Nero develops a gigantic crush on Kyrie, who, alongside Credo, he still visits in Fortuna, and Dante never lets him live it down for a moment. Nero builds Red Queen in the middle of the office; heavens forbid if Dante knows how he stuffed a working motor into a goddamn sword (she should offer him a Devil Arm, soon. Perhaps even… and she looks at Yamato, still and silent and beautiful on her mount). Nero starts tagging along on her jobs. The easy ones, mostly, even when he’s eighteen and chomping at the bit for more. Reluctance tugs at her every time he accompanies her, helpless concern warring with confidence and pride in his ability.

But she was already self-employed at his age. So in the end, she sets him free.

She returns to the office one day to find Yamato gone.

She calls Nero first. He picks up on the third ring, his voice rough with sleep even though it’s only 10PM, the rattling thrum of his junk van in the background. Nico must be driving. “Mom?”

“Nero. You okay?”

“Hm? Yeah—wha—?”

“Good,” she says. “Keep an eye out.” And slams the phone back on its cradle. Her heartbeat thunders in her ears. The phone rings, a shrill blast of sound in the dead silence of the office, but Dante doesn’t answer it. Her nails dig into the wood of her old, old desk. There’s a burning rage stirring inside her that she hasn’t felt in years, incentivising her tired bones.

Yamato had hung over her chair like a trophy, but she had laid seals upon seals and defense upon defense over its shimmering blade and pristine tsuka. Everything she could dig up from obscure old tomes she loathes to read on a good day. Everything Trish had offered to know. No human would have been able to touch her—no human would have dared. And no normal demon would have gotten through Dante’s wards without decimating her office.

 _Brring. Brring_.

She checks to make sure Ebony and Ivory are still in their holsters, checks Rebellion, then whirls around and stalks back out. She has a thief to hunt down.

She doesn’t find them, of course, because of all the powers in the world that Yamato can have, she has to be a fucking dimension-cutter.

Nero finds Dante sitting on the roof of Devil May Cry. He’s spitting mad; she can feel his ire on her back as clearly as the heat emanated from a crackling fire. “What the hell was that?” he demands, when she turns to face him. “You can’t just say something like that and fuck off! What’dyou think phones are for, anyway?”

“Nero,” she says.

His tirade dies down almost immediately when he takes a good look at her. Concern quickly softens his angry brow and hard mouth, and she thinks, _he’s a good kid_. “What’s going on?”

“Yamato is gone,” she says.

“The sword?” He remembers, she knows. He asked her once about it, about the Devil Arm that Dante never uses even though it hangs on the wall behind her instead of locked in the storage closet with everyone else. “Why?”

She has never once told him anything. Not about her brother, not about her past. Nero deserves better. She can’t even blame her procrastination on his age anymore, not when he’s turning twenty-four soon. “Whatever the reason, it’s nothing good,” she says. “Yamato is a powerful Devil Arm. More powerful than all the others I’ve got in my closet.”

“It’s important to you.”

She barely manages to suppress a blanch. “You could say that.”

Nero squints at her. “So we just have to find this thief and kick his ass, right? Why’re you sittin’ here?”

“Yamato can cut through anything,” she says. “Even space.” She closes her eyes. “If they know how to use her, we’ll never find them.”

“So, what, the only thing we can do is sit and wait?”

“They’ll turn up again,” says Dante. “They always do.”

She’s right. Morrison walks through the door of Devil May Cry a little over two weeks later, asks politely after Nero—who’s once again hunting to his heart’s content with Nico, last Dante heard—and introduces her to her new client.

Her heart stamps his name to her ribcage with every beat. It hasn’t stopped since V first voiced it in her office a month ago; it won’t stop until she’s cold and dead and six feet under beneath the earth.

Vergil.

Vergil.

 _Vergil_.

He watches her with guarded eyes, still and regal and everything Dante remembers, but _better_. Real. Then his frigid gaze slides to Nero, and fear washes through her so lightning-quick she almost staggers. He will not touch Nero. No matter what.

She strikes first. Up close, his irises are the palest ice. She hears him speak for the first time in twenty-four years, and his voice slots into her memories like a favorite glove, so well-fitting her knees go weak and he slams her down and backwards with effortless, fluid grace.

“Mom!”

Nero steps forward, growling, demonic arm raised, and Dante snaps: “Stay back, Nero!”

He does, though he looks very unhappy about it. Dante clambers to her feet but Vergil is already slicing through the space behind him, and through her swimming vision and pounding ears she sees the azure-limned gash of a rift pulling apart, hears the hollow echo of the abyss it reveals. Her feet struggle to move.

Vergil looks back at her, back at Nero, and says, in a tone strangely soft: “Thank you, Nero.”

The rift closes behind him. Dante swears and stabs her new Devil Sword Dante into the bloody dirt, frustration and fury and turmoil yanking her in twenty different directions. She wants to dropkick Vergil in his stupid, handsome face. She wants to stab him over and over, scream at him for his inability to change. She wants to laugh and revel in the fact that he’s alive. She wants to cry.

“That was your brother?”

She squeezes her eyes shut. Now she has to face Nero.

“Yeah,” she says. “Turns out V was half of him all along. Who would’ve thunk.” She should’ve thunk. She’d trusted V about as much as she’d trusted herself not to lose her shit in front of Urizen, but she’d hardly spared him a second thought knowing Vergil was out there, somewhere.

“You never said anything about him.” Nero’s voice is small.

“Opportunity never arose, I guess,” she lies. She hauls her sword out of the ground and onto her shoulder. “Go back to Trish and the others. I’ll handle this.”

“No way,” Nero snarls, storming after her. “He’s strong, right? He took Yamato from you. I can help.”

“Go _back_. This isn’t your concern.”

“ _Stop brushing me off_!”

“ _I’m not_!” She spins around and gets right up in his face. “You’re good, Nero, I’ll give you that. You can plenty well take care of yourself. But Vergil is different. He’s like nothing you’ve ever faced, nothing you’ve ever known. He’s _my_ responsibility. I’ll take care of this.”

“I don’t care about all that!” Nero shouts. “You were missing for a _month_! I know about the fucking deed! Morrison told me about it! You don’t plan on coming back!”

That traitor. “Nero…”

“I’m not gonna let you do this alone.” His face contorts; his eyes glimmer. “You’re my mom. I’m not gonna let you leave me.”

Dante takes a step back. Her grip tightens around the hilt of her sword. She loves Nero, she really does. In her mind he will always be ten years old and bumbling and shy, finally noticing the naked ladies on the magazine covers and slamming his hands over his eyes, going so red steam blows out of his ears. He will always be ten years old and cooking for her, even though he can barely see over the stovetop. He will always be ten years old, and calling her _Mom_ for the first time.

“I should’ve told you,” she says. The Devil Sword vanishes from her hand in a burst of crimson motes. She steels herself, curls her fingers into fists to stop the shaking. “I’m not your mother, Nero. I may have raised you, but you’re not mine.”

Nero stares at her.

She laughs, bitterly. “Even better? Vergil’s your father. Your real father.”

Nero’s brain breaks in front of her; confusion and disbelief slacken his entire face. He absolutely deserves better.

She leaves him standing alone at the bottom (the top) of the Qliphoth. Nico tosses her Lady’s new Kalina Ann, and she cocks it and stores it away. Twenty-four years. Deja vu; full circle.

The tears finally come as she makes her way skyward. She wipes them off with an angry scrub of her fist.

Vergil is waiting for her on a platform twisting high above the earth’s atmosphere. Melodramatic jerk. She takes one step forward, then another. Ahead of her, he stands up, and the black tendrils of his demonic throne wisp away into the ether. He turns to face her.

“I see you haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic, brother,” she says.

He inclines his head. “And you’ve finally found yourself a shirt, sister.” His eyes narrow. “Have you been crying?”

Dante chuckles, choked and short. “You wish. So.” She raises her hand. “Time to hand over the Yamato, big brother.”

And they fight. Again.

Vergil had bid her rest, but of course Dante hadn’t listened to him. She’s never listened to him, and she isn’t gonna start now, not when she’s over forty years old and especially not when Vergil barely looks a day over thirty. But the nonstop battles have eroded away at her, from the Angelo to Cerberus to Urizen, and she grudgingly admits to herself that he may have had a point.

In her defense, she keeps up for a long fucking time.

“You’re sluggish,” says Vergil.

“Not as much as you,” she grumbles, anchors her boot into the dirt. Thrusts forward, and Vergil blocks with such an easy, small, economical movement that she stumbles. He doesn’t press his advantage, and just like that, she knows.

“Stop going easy on me.”

“This is pointless,” he says. “You’re not at full strength.”

“I don’t fucking care! Don’t patronize me!” In a blast of heat and infernal flame, she Triggers. Vergil raises Yamato, and they collide in a storm of ringing steel and crackling sparks. She rains searing blows down upon him, wings flared and rune-marks glowing blinding-hot in streaks of crumbling magma. “I beat you last time, brother, did you forget? More than once—twice—I didn’t just beat you, more than that—you died, _I killed you_ —”

“Dante,” says Vergil, his hair aflutter in the midst of her frenzy, the rest of him unmoving.

“I would have followed you. I would have helped you—”

“ _Dante_.”

“ _You left me_ ,” she screams at him, and cleaves her sword through his chest.

The trigger dissipates in a flush of hot air, takes with it her fury and leaves her cold and gasping for breath. Vergil places a hand on the blade, the leather of his glove rasping against the harsh black edges and feral design. “Any day now,” he says blandly.

She jerks the sword out of him. It’s too familiar: the squelch of flesh, the spray of blood. So familiar that she bows over, teeth gritted, staring hard at the platinum dust powdering her boots. Prime time for Vergil to strike, but she knows he won’t. And he doesn’t.

It’s been thirty-six years since she’s cried in front of him. She hides her face behind her hand. Fuck. She chuckles bitterly. She’d been aiming for forever.

Then Vergil speaks. “You moved on.”

She startles. “What?”

His jaw tightens. The front of his vest is soaked berry-red in his blood, but his wound has already healed. He slips Yamato between one hand and the other, a slow, mesmerizing spin of dexterity. “After everything. You moved on. You have a son.”

“Yes,” she murmurs. She would always think of Nero as her son. But Nero has nothing to do with this. She looks up and sees the way the corners of his eyes minisculely tighten, the way the furrow between his eyebrows grows deeper.

“You dumbass,” she says. “He’s not mine. He’s yours.”

Vergil’s lips part.

“I dunno when you had the time, but I guess even _you_ were young once,” she continues. “I found him in Fortuna. Just a little orphan kid; nine years old.” She exhales. “Guess you didn’t know.”

“No.” Vergil’s expression does something complicated. He’s even harder to read now than he was at nineteen, so, so long ago. “You raised him?”

“No shit.” She rolls her shoulders and slashes down with the Dante. “He’s a good kid. Better than the both of us combined. Mom’s genes must’ve skipped right over us.”

“Must have,” Vergil agrees. And then he smiles, and Dante’s heart does a weird little kickflip and lands flat on its left ventricle. It’s twenty years ago, and she’s dreaming about his hands and lips and voice whispering _Dante_ all over again.

She can’t do this. She can’t. She wipes her cheeks on her filthy sleeve and levels her sword at him.

“Let’s end this, Vergil,” she says.

His face closes off. He nods.

But Nero crashes in at that very second, his face an incredible shade of puce, newly-minted spectral wings exploding from his back, and their feud is momentarily forgotten. He shouts at her until he’s out of breath. Then he takes a huge, magnificent huff, and continues shouting.

She doesn’t mind so much, because what little she manages to catch is this:

_I don’t care if you’re not my real mother! You’re still my mom! So stop running away from me! FUUUUCK._

Oh, Nero, she thinks fondly, when he rounds on his father next. Never change.

She lets Nero face him, the motorized rage of Red Queen and his demon hand against the still beauty of Yamato. She realizes, finally, how badly Nero has wanted to prove himself to her, with his high-octane energy in every strike and his impassioned fury blazing trails across the sky; she sees herself in him, seven years old and tackling Vergil to the ground. Full circle.

She watches, too, the way Vergil looks at him. With calculation, caution, and a menacing curiosity fit for the panther companion of his human half. He knows who Nero is, and somehow… somehow that changes something.

“Sluggish,” she calls, when Nero knocks Vergil down.

Vergil hisses, “Shut _up_ , Dante!” the same time Nero yells, “Shut up, Mom!”, and then they stare at each other for a long, dumbfounded moment.

And Dante laughs.

When she falls, she falls first, with the warmth of Nero’s hug still in her veins and the relief of knowing she won’t be left behind again. Nero hadn’t been happy, of course—but she’s given him her word. She’ll be back. She won’t leave him.

A rush of air. Vergil shoots past her, wings folded and needle-like tail whipping behind him, a wordless taunt.

She dives after him, as she is ever wont to do.

The Qliphoth sundered, they alternate between dueling each other, slaughtering the demons that try to ambush them, and searching for a way back. Time passes without demarcation in the Underworld; it feels like one extremely long, endless day, and Dante feels her limbs drag more and more with each passing moment. She’s loathe to prove Vergil right—something that still hasn’t changed, and probably never will—so she bites back the aches and pains that remind her way too much about her age, and charges on.

It’s Vergil who finally sees fit to stop her, even though she’s got him pinned to the sulphurous earth with her Devil Sword millimeters from his throat. “You need rest.”

“Right back atcha,” she says. Gives him an insouciant grin. “How does it feel, gettin’ your ass kicked by a girl?”

He gazes up at her for second. “Oh, is that what you are?” he drawls.

“Don’t tell me you never noticed.”

“Hm.”

Her heart races. In truth, she has never dreamed of being in this position; looming over him, two inches shy of straddling his stomach. She should move aside, but Vergil hasn’t thrown her off yet, even though he can, easily. He’s watching her. She realizes, suddenly, that she catches him watching her a lot.

Self-consciousness bolts through her for the first time in a long, long while. She waves away the Dante and quickly clambers off him to rise to her feet; he follows suit and sheathes Yamato in a swift, graceful slide.

“Let’s keep looking,” she says, filling the silence, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “The faster we find something, the less likely Nero will—”

“Dante.”

Dante turns back around to face him. Vergil’s scrutinizing the infernal sky, which is scarlet and gray and choked with hazy fog. When he finally looks back at her, his face is calm and his eyes are serene.

“You’ve gotten strong.”

Her breath stutters. “Of course I have,” she says. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been a long ass time, Verg.” Her grin returns, a little shakier. “I’m an old lady now.”

“You sell yourself short.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

“It means you’ve found yourself,” he says, as casually as if he’d just told her the rent is due tomorrow. “Something to live for. It emanates from you; it’s blinding.”

 _Fuck_ , she can’t take this. “What’s going on?” she jokes. “Why’re you being nice to me?”

Vergil lifts a single shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “An observation, nothing more.”

“You can’t just say that and expect me not to make fun of you.”

“I expect no less,” he says dryly.

He’s different again from what she remembers, the arctic demeanor she’d found so grating at nineteen thawed around the edges. Vergil, who can, in fact, change. It’s strange to say that splitting himself in half seems to have done him good, despite the path that got him there. The hope swelling between her ribs is so profound she has to squash it down before it can show on her face.

Not entirely successful, as always. “Something’s eating at you,” says Vergil.

“Just the opposite,” she whispers. “Can I hug you, or will you stab me?”

“I’ll think about it,” he says, even as she wraps her arms around him tight and buries her face into his chest. He stiffens, then relaxes, and she feels the light touch of his arm land around her shoulders. “That wasn’t permission,” he says.

Her voice comes out muffled. “I don’t need your permission. When was the last time you got a hug, anyway?” Vergil is warm, so incongruous with everything else about him. She pulls away just enough to tell him: “You stink.”

“You don’t smell like roses yourself, sister.”

“Rude,” she says.

He smiles, just a little. When she rises up, he bends down to meet her.

**EPILOGUE**

Dante doesn’t even know when she lost her keys, so she’s relegated to banging on her own front door in the hopes that Nero has already taken over the business.

Nero yanks it open on the sixth bang, pajamas askew, cropped hair tousled like a tornado touched down on a contained zone consisting of only his head. “ _What_?” he snarls. Pauses. Takes in Dante, her fist still raised, and Vergil, standing quietly behind her, with wide eyes.

“I’m home?” says Dante.

Nero’s mouth wobbles. “Okay.”

Dante tries to suppress a smile. “Just okay?”

“I’d hug you,” he says, a little tearfully, “but you smell like _ass_.”

She raises her arms and advances on him anyway. “Bring it in, kid.”

Nero yelps and scrambles back; Dante catches him in a burst of crimson before he can even manage three steps. She squeezes ferociously and he sputters and squirms in her grip, which, despite her significantly shorter stature, is iron-strong and more inescapable than a maximum security prison. Vergil merely inclines his head at Nero and sweeps past them.

“How long has it been?” says Dante, her eyes following her brother briefly before returning to Nero and crinkling alongside the smile on her face.

“Six months,” Nero wheezes nasally, like he’s holding his breath, which he most definitely is. “Let go of me!”

“Aw, Nero, you’re hurting my feelings.”

“ _Mom_.”

“ _Nero_ ,” she echoes, before she finally takes pity on him and lets go. He scrabbles frantically at the new stains on his t-shirt, complaining all the while. Dante’s smile doesn’t leave her face; she can’t help it. She glances over to Vergil, who has set Yamato carefully on her desk and is watching placidly from afar, the normally severe shadows cast over his features as gentled and diffused as she’s ever seen them.

Here it is: the family she was so sure she would never have again.

Nero pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please, for the love of God, take a shower.” His eyes nervously flick over to Vergil, then back to Dante. “Both of you.”

“Good plan.” She’s never been the paragon example of cleanliness, but six months without a shower is pushing it way too far, even for her. She’s never felt more greasy and slimy—but she’s also never felt this happy, so she’s pretty sure it’s a fair trade.

She pats Nero on the back; he winces, because her gloves are gross, too. “Go back to bed,” she says. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

Nero hesitates.

“Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere.”

He nods. Flicks another antsy glance at Vergil, before heading back upstairs. She waits till she hears the faint sound of his bed springs creaking—it takes a moment, probably Nero changing into a clean shirt—then approaches her brother, who’s now gazing around her office.

“It’s been a long time,” she says. “Since you were last here.”

He looks at her sidelong. “Some of your furniture is still the same.”

“Yes, well. It’s a perfectly good desk. And couch. And jukebox, thank you.”

“And now you have a billiards table and a bar,” says Vergil. “Tacky as ever.”

“Oh, yeah? You wore a _cravat_ when we were teens. Don’t you know what century we live in?”

“And you wore absolutely nothing beneath your coat. Your point being?”

She sighs. “Got me there.”

Vergil circles around her desk. Dante holds her breath when his eyes fall on their mother’s portrait still sitting on the corner. He picks it up with one hand, expression muted. Ah. Dante isn’t necessarily looking forward to introducing him to Trish.

“I remember seeing this,” he says. “I’m surprised you never lost it.”

“Give me some credit,” Dante mutters. She reaches for Vergil’s sleeve, then curls her fingers around his wrist. Each time, it gets a little easier to reach for him. “Let’s hit the shower. Nero’s right; I feel like a slaughtered pig.”

Vergil sets down the portrait. He follows her up the stairs, into her room, which is much cleaner than she remembers, no stray articles of clothing laying around and even the bed fully made. Nero’s doing, most definitely.

Dante offers Vergil the shower first, and he accepts without argument. She takes a second to admire the corded muscles in his bare arms as he neatly folds his coat over a chair, then, when the bathroom door closes behind him, she sets out to find something for him to wear. Very unlikely anything of hers would fit him, given the foot he has on her in height.

She rummages through her tiny, messy closet, filled with red leather and faded black fabric. She’ll have to ask Nero, she thinks, or steal one from his room without waking him.

Something dark and sleeveless catches her eye, much too large for the rest of her wardrobe. She pushes aside the jacket that kept it concealed, and feels a cold splash of water through her veins. Vergil’s vest, from so long ago. Never washed, and she can already see Vergil’s nose crinkling in her mind’s eye.

Dante runs a hand over it, gentle and careful. Then she puts the jacket back on top of it and closes the door.

A tentative knock reaches her ears. Nero pokes his sleepy head into her room and offers her a neatly folded bundle of clothes. “Thought he might need it,” he mumbles.

“Thanks, kid,” she says, her whole being soft for him. “Sleep well.”

He murmurs his own good night and shuffles away, and she opens the bathroom door a crack to slip the clean clothes onto the counter. Vergil emerges soon after in Nero’s old t-shirt and sweats, the tee stretched slightly around his shoulders and the sweatpants an inch or two too short.

She assesses him with a smirk. “Should’ve tried to stuff you into one of my outfits.”

“You own other clothing?” he ripostes mildly.

His silvery hair is damp and falling into his eyes. He’s never looked more approachable; she wants so badly to kiss him, but she hops to her feet instead to take her turn in the shower, peeling off her sweat-stained, dirt-stained, bloodstained henley as she goes.

She returns, freshly dressed and teeth brushed, to find her room empty. Alarm blasts through her as quick and brutal as a strike of lightning, and she has to lean on the doorframe for support—but then she feels the low hum of Vergil’s power, the unmistakable tingle of his demonic presence nearby, and she exhales long and slow.

Vergil is sitting on the couch, Yamato leaning against the arm. He used to rest here on this very piece of furniture, she remembers, on those rare days he would stay overnight.

“Come to bed,” she says, plopping down next to him and nuzzling into his side, knowing she’s pushing the boundaries of his personal space but not caring so much in the moment, in the dark, with both of them clean and warm from the shower.

“I distinctly remember that you kick in your sleep.”

“I—from what? Since when?” She remembers. “I was _seven_!”

“Some habits never change.” The corner of his mouth tilts up.

He’s such an asshole. Dante loves him so fucking much. “You’ll live,” she says, and leans in. They kiss, soft and chaste. “Just stay with me.”

He hums in acknowledgment. Follows her upstairs again, and joins her when she crawls beneath the covers. The bed is cramped with him in it, and that’s the excuse she gives him when she scoots closer, till her face is pressed against his chest and his arm has nowhere else to go but around her.

It’s home. She finally sleeps, and doesn’t dream.


	2. fanart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art done by [@haloefn](https://twitter.com/haloefn), with the second one done by [@mlxgdog](https://twitter.com/mlxgdog)! thank you so much!


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